It's been a long time friends. FAMILY My son is getting married in December. FRIENDS I got to see mk, ecib, dccrux and mike a few weeks ago and it was glorious. WORK Work at the main job is great except for crappy macro-economic factors putting downward pressure on sales, making investors twitchy, and making executives panic... We'll see if I have a job in the next couple months. I am a tiny bit involved with ethosmobile.org and that is going well also. Lots to do, but feels very bootstrappy and exciting. ART My Own Private Idaho has been on my list to watch for YEARS and I finally got around to it. I will admit, I didn't love it... but I certainly didn't hate it... but the fact that I'm still thinking about it days later says something about its weight and effect. Above all else, it's amazing to me that a film that queer forward with such big names at the time was even made. I mean - it was a year before Murphy Brown enraged the GOP. Anyway... I'm still processing, and I think that's a great thing. Any time a film makes me think, that's a good thing. And more than that - When the credits rolled, I felt inspired like I needed to pick the camera back up - and that's a good thing.
My Own Private Idaho had a few things going for it: - It's Shakespeare's Falstaff cycle, and anything with Falstaff in it is beloved by actors who get annoyed that the audience mostly wants Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream. - It's six years after Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was nominated for four Academy Awards (and won William Hurt his Oscar). - "Movies with songs in the titles" were a thing at the time (Peggy Sue Got Married, La Bamba, Pretty Woman, Lean On Me) and "quirky cult hit from the '70s" perfectly matched Van Sant's absolutely puny budget. There were lots of scripts floating around at the time where the racy stuff ended up getting cut in the edit; executives probably figured the end result would be much tamer when it was released but it wasn't. - Van Sant REALLY REALLY WANTED IT TO HAPPEN. River Phoenix is good in it. Keanu Reeves is good in it. The guy who plays Falstaff in it is really good but you never see him again which I think says a lot about the way the industry regarded My Own Private Idaho. Really, if you want an explanation for Private Idaho it's that it's the movie that most shows what River Phoenix could have become which, combined with the age of the ascendancy of Blockbuster, made it a rental favorite. "Whoa! A River Phoenix movie I've never heard of! Holy shit it's about gay dudes... Hey Julie you'll never believed what I watched last night!" Certain movies are what they are because of VHS.
Aquarium update: after waiting probably too long for the new tank to settle, I decided to add livestock (some neon tetra's and panda corydoras). It's been going great. I also had totally forgotten that Cities:Skylines 2 launched this week. Supposedly it's optimized more poorly than Cyberpunk was at launch, making 4090's sweat if you have the wrong settings. But I was due for a GPU upgrade anyway - my ancient 1060 couldn't manage a playable framerate in CP2077 even if it were in optimal condition.
Lol, I tried CS2 on my 1060 and got a whopping 7 FPS. But that may also be because the _city_ builder is rendering detailed _teeth_ for every citizen
This will be a great game in 3-5 years after a half dozen expansions. Paradox games should never be played at release but they are always crazy expensive for the whole game once expansions release. If you actually want to play it on your hardware try GeForce now and see how it runs on a 4080. That might help bridge the gap. Otherwise just return it by using the Steam 4 hour refund policy. By the time the expansions come out and it’s playable the base game will be 10-20$ and you will get the expansion for 20$ each
Broke up over the weekend. Between slowly realising I'm not the manic-neurotic one in this relationship and a partner whose libido had Iodine-131's half-life, it's kinda surprising we lasted almost six months. Still, I haven't felt this bummed by a break-up in a while. My teaching-thing is going OK, but I'm beginning to see why there wasn't much competition for the post. So, every other weekend, I basically go to the school and do the same material eight times, four on each day. Not that I didn't expect it from the job description, but dang, super-duper kudos to primary/secondary teachers for enduring this daily. Since my brain wasn't exactly up to anything serious this week, I ended up reading the first seven volumes Gotrek and Felix whenever not trying to kick my steaming pile of math forward at work. They're in that ambigious zone between not-bad-for-fantasy and straight-up guilty pleasure, but fun for what they are.
Rugby World Cup final this weekend. NZ vs South Africa - the old foe. The winner will lift the Cup for a record 4th time, though NZ have undergone quite the redemption arc. 12 months ago NZ had lost a home series to Ireland (first time that's happened) a first home loss to Argentina, as well as record points loss against South Africa. Looking back even further, the last four years have felt like the swansong of the dominant era of NZ rugby. First loss to Ireland, first loss to Argentina. England in the 2019 World Cup dismantled NZ so thoroughly I think the psychic damage is still being felt. I'd never seen a team unstitch us so effectively. The coach and the captain were on the chopping block, but in the space of a year they've turned it around. They nearly put 100 points past Italy, toppled No. 1 Ireland, breezed past a fiesty Argentina and will now face the big dogs in the final. Uhh yeah. Rugby rah rah. Two months into Spring aaand it's snowing outside my office window. Fingers crossed it starts to settle and my boss tells me to go home, I'll start the weekend early.